Centering on Essential Lenses

Lenses are powerful tools. With the right lens on your camera, you can see things very close up, or incredibly distant. The right lenses can help you bring light to dark places, or shelter the darkness from too much intruding light. Turn the lens on your microscope or telescope the right way, and what was blurry becomes much easier to see. #

Lenses are good for focusing on what matters in a given situation, challenge, or opportunity. But you need several in your camera bag if you want to see the most of the world and capture it for yourself or others. #

Beyond cameras, the metaphorical lenses or frames that we apply to our experiences can help us to better understand them, or to give us new ways of seeing what’s happening to or around us. There are three lenses that seem essential for any learner’s toolbag, be that learner a student in a classroom, or one who frames the learning of others. Helping to build and shape and develop these lenses is essential for lifelong learning in the 21st Century. Or the 20th. Or the 22nd. #

How you see is shaped by how you look. And we say folks should look with lenses like these. #

There’s a copy of Make Magazine on my desk right now as I write this, as much as talisman as anything else. I’m not a big DIY guy around the house. To be honest, my lawn sprinklers are in serious need of attention right now, and I am in over my head. I pity the portion of my yard that suffers while I figure that out. It’s a slow journey for me as a suburban homeowner to adapt my environment to my needs. #

But I’ve always believe that making things is essential to the craft of teaching and learning. Students learn more and better and fuller and richer when they are making something to demonstrate their learning. Or making something to share their learning. Or making something to help them understand their learning. Or . . . well, you get it, don’t you? #

Learning happens when we make things. We make sense of new situations. We make knowledge by processing our experiences. We make tools to help us do things we might not yet be able to do. Making matters. #

Hacking too often gets a bad rap, because we’ve lost the sense of the word. The original definition of a hack was a fiddle that improved a process or a program. A hacker was someone who made such changes. Hackers were revered in technology communities, because they took what was there and made it better. The first hackers tweaked some code and made their software or hardware do something that it couldn’t do before. Later, the term grew to include people who fiddled for nefarious purposes. #

But the original meaning of hacking is worth reclaiming. Hackers are the folks you want on your side when something’s not working like you want it to. Hackers improve things. #

Learning happens when we hack things, too, because we must understand what our situation is, and how we can fiddle with it, in order to improve it. #

While there are many definitions of “play,” our favorite is the definition of play as the search for freedom within constraints. When a system, be it law, or culture, or “the rules” of whatever you find yourself in, blocks something, playing with that system results in your discovery of freedom or agency. That playing might require you to make something, or to hack something. But good play certainly requires that you understand what and who you’re playing with, and perhaps even the nature of the game. If you don’t like the game, perhaps you can tinker your way into a better one. #

Playing with information or structures or situations can lead to powerful learning. #

And maybe the best sort of way to spend your time as a learner is through making, or hacking, or playing. Or maybe all three. And along the way, you might rediscover the parts of yourself that have gone to sleep. Or have never been awake. Those are the parts that you can use to make and hack and play wherever you happen to be. #

These lenses can lead to agency. And that’s worth shooting for. That’s a life skill that’s bigger than science or geography or math or language arts. Applying and being aware of agency to and in whatever you’re doing, agency informed by your abilities to make and hack and play, leads to you being more fully in control of your situation. #

That’s powerful learning. So enter the Center for Make/Hack/Play, an ethospace informed by and seeking to inform others of the value of making, hacking and playing. A place where it’s all about the agency of the learner and the art and habits of active learning. #

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some ideas for applying making, hacking, and playing lenses and principles to the work that should happen in schools and classrooms and learning organizations. We hope to offer workshops and work with schools and teachers and the community to build and sustain spaces for this kind of learning. While some of this learning requires specialized tools and equipment and classrooms, not all of it does. The principles of making, hacking and playing can thrive in any learning situation. And maybe they should. #

Great post! Your references to lenses reminded me of a bulletin board I use to have in my classroom that said something to the effect that, “This classroom is your microscope on the world.” Not being much of a bulletin board guy, it usually stayed up all year and for some years my classroom was a telescope. More here (http://goo.gl/RxHuN)David Warlick´s last blog post ..Who Wouldn’t Want Students to Learn Critical Thinking Skills?

Not sure exactly. Could be a meta kind of thing….”How do we make/hack/play as teachers?” (Maybe less interesting/engaging but could be an effective springboard to subsequent groups where we do specific make/hack/play projects?)

There are also some things already on P2PU that we could clone and adjust for teachers…. Hackasaurus, etc.

[…] this week and last about some of the work we’re starting in my school district around make/hack/play. But in two conversations last week, I was struck that the folks asking me questions had equated […]

This concept of learning lenses – making, hacking, and playing – reminds me that learning is a lifetime experience. It is important that we teach our students how exciting it is to obtain new knowledge, how great it feels to be competent in a new area.

[…] this same theory of hacking in learning, Bud Hunt’s blog post, “Centering on Essential Lenses: Make/Hack/Play” takes it one step further. Making is important to learning as we have said before and hacking is a […]

[…] term to represent finding new and innovative ways to accomplish a basic task. After reading Centering On Essential Lenses, a blog by Bud Hunt, on the ways to introduce Hacking to schools, I have many questions as to what […]

[…] hacking your computer, bank account, etc. As Bud Hunt describes the term in one of his earlier blog posts, “The original definition of a hack was a fiddle that improved a process or a program.” […]

[…] “Centering on Essential Lenses: Make/Hack/Play” a blog entry cross-posted by Bud Hunt discusses the concept of learning through the example of lenses. He claims that it is important to use the right lens to focus in on a certain situation or idea. I completely agree. The three lenses mentioned in the article include making, hacking, and playing. As an aspiring English teacher, I hope to be able to fully utilize each of these approaches to their fullest potential. As an aspiring homeschool mom, I hope to do the same. What really attracts me to these concepts is also what relates them, creativity. Making, hacking, and playing all promote students to bring forth and exercise their creative instincts, which should be the goal for all types of education. […]

[…] is something that I am interested in. After watching Logan LaPlante’s TED talk and reading Centering on Essential Lenses , Hacking is something that I hope to be able to successfully incorporate into my own classroom. I […]

[…] options to teach students in different ways that allow them to learn special interests. The article Centering on Essential Lenses describes how children learn better when they are actually making things with their hands rather […]